Osteopathy can help to identify, treat and prevent many aches, pains and complaints, including minor sports injuries. Through moving, stretching and massaging your muscles and joints, our team take a holistic approach to wellbeing to help you recover from sports injuries and prevent them from reoccurring.
Whether you’re a full time athlete or simply like to play sports with your friends or a local team, find out how to prevent sports injuries with osteopathy below.
Ankle Sprains
While playing sports, if you step over something and your ankle rolls out, this is an ankle sprain. For the first 24-48 hours you may experience swelling and pain. Therefore, resting and elevating with your ankle is important, with 20 minutes ice on and 20 minutes off before being compressed in a bandage to provide support.
Your osteopath will be able to diagnose any issues, as well as speed up the healing process and recommend necessary follow up scans or referrals. Our team can help to reduce inflammation near your ankle injury and help to encourage movement. In addition, your hips, lower back and pelvis will be monitored for imbalances caused by the injury.
Knee Pain
If you begin to feel pain around your knee cap, this could be Patellofemoral Joint Syndrome. Most often this is caused by muscles becoming very tight if they haven’t been stretched or treated enough. When trying to bend your knee, tight muscles can pull at your knee cap, making this action more difficult and painful. On the other hand, knee pain could also be caused by weak glute muscles.
With sports osteopathy, we can work to loosen off musculature around your knee and hip. This will help to ease the pulling and weak muscles, while we also advise short exercises to reduce the chances of injury recurrence.
Hamstring Strains
A hamstring muscle tear, ranging from a couple of muscle fibres to a true tear, is known as a hamstring strain. If you place excessive pressure on a muscle or partake in repetitive activities, this can cause a strain. These types of injuries are most common among runners and can take up to 18 weeks to heal.
Osteopathic treatment can help to speed up recovery time, while preventing injury recurrence.
Shin Splints
When the muscles located on either side of your shin are overused, your muscles can begin to tighten and pull on your tendinous attachment to your shin. As a result, your muscle may begin tearing the outer soft tissue layer, which is known as shin splints.
Without treatment, shin splints will only worsen and grow more painful. Osteopathic techniques can help to relax the irritated area and tight tibialis muscles, as well as correct biomechanical imbalances.
Weight Training
Poor technique and weak back and gluteal muscles can cause weight training injuries. An osteopath can identify and target areas of weakness in your movement patterns and offer advice on how to improve your routine. Our team can release muscle tension from being overused to help restore full range of joint motion where it became restricted due to specific movement patterns your body had adjusted to.
Osteopathic Treatment for Injury Recurrence
At Solihull Osteopathic Practice, we treat your body as a whole rather than focusing on the injured area. This allows us to correct imbalances, which can be causing body functions to move out of alignment. Our team of osteopaths have a highly developed sense of touch and are able to find and target sources of pain through the manipulation, massaging and stretching of muscles and joints. As a result, you can experience pain relief, reduced inflammation and improved mobility.
If you’re looking to prevent injury recurrence to ensure that every game or competition is your best, contact our team today by calling 0121 705 4499, or send us an email.